


Blood and Sand

by TacitWhisky



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Jon is a gladiator, Roman AU, so don't at me, this is not historically accurate, yes you can picture him shirtless from that terrible pompeii movie if you want
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 12:03:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21299162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TacitWhisky/pseuds/TacitWhisky
Summary: Jon had looked for Sansa in the crowd as he stumbled onto the sands beside his fellow gladiators: in the high box reserved for house Lannista he’d looked for the daughter to murdered lord Eddardeus Starki, for the slender and haughty Roman girl whose hair flashed copper in the sun, for the girl he’d been raised beside all his life but who had never seen him as anything more than the barbarian ward of her father’s, the girl who his gaze had been drawn to again and again no matter how he knew it shouldn’t.But after the dark of the arena underbelly the sun’s gaze was blinding and by the time Jon had blinked it back from his eyes there was a sword in his hand and a man screaming towards him and no time for anything but the clash of steel and spray of blood and roar of the crowd.TLDR: a Rome AU where Jon is sold as a gladiator after the Lannisters betray the Starks, and only years later meets Sansa again beneath the shadow of the coliseum.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 31
Kudos: 165





	Blood and Sand

When Jon meets Sansa again it is in the shadow of the coliseum, below the white marble and red awning and rows of seats, the roar of the crowd that had surged and rolled over the sands ebbed to a low crash in the distance.

Jon had looked for her in the crowd as he stumbled onto the sands beside his fellow gladiators: in the high box reserved for house Lannista he’d looked for the daughter to murdered lord Eddardeus Starki, for the slender and haughty Roman girl whose hair flashed copper in the sun, for the girl he’d been raised beside all his life but who had never seen him as anything more than the barbarian ward of her father’s, the girl who his gaze had been drawn to again and again no matter how he knew it shouldn’t.

But after the dark of the arena underbelly the sun’s gaze was blinding and by the time Jon had blinked it back from his eyes there was a sword in his hand and a man screaming towards him and no time for anything but the clash of steel and spray of blood and roar of the crowd.

That same man’s blood dries and flakes from Jon’s arm as he stands shackled behind the black bars that separate him and the other gladiators that fought on the sands beside him from the milling Romans come to point and gawk and stare at the champions of the arena. Through the crowd a pair of centurions shove their way to the front, hands resting on the pommel of their swords as they eye Jon for a moment before stepping aside.

It is then Jon catches sight of Sansa.

_ They always said you would be beautiful. _ The words are silent and sour on Jon’s tongue. Only three years it’s been since he last saw her, but in those three years she’s grown from the girl he remembers into a proper patrician woman: tall and slender and lovely beneath loose silks, a gold choker clasped around her throat and a silver serpent with emerald eyes coiling around one arm, a copper half crown resting in the elegantly piled coils of her red hair. That same red hair that had haunted his childhood, a whisper on the wind that only ever slipped from between his fingers if he reached for it.

He should look down. The stinging lash of the whip has taught Jon as much over the last three year: to never raise his eyes to citizen or centurion or patrician, but he cannot seem to as he watches Sansa approach the black bars, the silk hem of her skirt whispering over the uneven cobbles, cannot stop his eyes from trying to seek out hers.

“I saw you upon the sands.” A breeze lifts a few strays of Sansa’s hair before her face and she combs them back with a hand, eyes tiltings to meet his as she does: the same piercing blue as he remembers, like some hidden mountain pool. “You fought well,” the merest hesitation in her voice; then, soft and precise, “gladiator.”

_ Gladiator. _ Something claws at Jon’s throat, throbbing and ugly. _ Did you think she would greet you like some long lost brother, _ a voice in him hisses. Stripped to the waist and filthy with sweat and sand, blood drying and flaking from his shackled hands, black hair slicked and dripping, Jon knows well and truly what he looks. The barbarian he’s never been let forget he is all his life, a feral thing that will never be civilized no matter how long it lives among true Romans, a creature of the wilds beyond the light of Rome.

_ But she always knew that. Always saw you for the animal you were. What made you think it would be different now? _

A dull ache throbs through Jon, but if there is one thing he’s learned the last three years it is pain. “You’re generous to say so,” he bites out, hardening his jaw and forcing himself to meet Sansa’s gaze again, “_domina_.”

Something flickers in Sansa’s eyes, and for a moment she looks as just as young as she once did. Her lips part as though to speak, but her gaze twitches to the pair of centurion behind her, and whatever she was to say dies unspoken. Jon followers her gaze, for the first time noting the bronze cloak pins stamped with the asiatic lion of house Lannista. _ Guards from her betrothed no doubt. _

Sansa bites her lip. “The mob tells a strange tale of you,” she says carefully. “They say you lived among Romans once.”

“You must be mistaken, domina.” Jon shakes his head, a bitterness he thought stripped from him long ago seeping into his words. “What lord would be foolish enough to ward a barbarian like me?”

Sansa blinks. Her tongue traces her lips, and Jon wishes he could look away, hates himself for the way he can’t. Sansa glances at the centurions, both of whose attention has drifted away, then takes a swift step toward him. “You can tell no one who you are,” she says, voice low and urgent. “Do you hear me, Jon? No one must know you were father’s ward.”

_ Jon. _ The name is painful somehow, the dull ache of a rotted tooth. How long has it been since he heard it last? A year? More? _ An animal has no name. And that’s all you’ve ever been to her. _ “Of course not,” he grinds out. “I wouldn’t want to embarrass you, domina.”

Sansa draws back from the bars as though slapped, eyes searching his face, jaw settling in a hard line. “Is that what you think of me?”

“What else should I think?” Jon tilts his head to the side, a cold, distant fury welling deep in him. “I was there, Sansa. I saw it, saw the Lannista _ butcher _ your house. I felt the life leave your father’s body. And now here you stand- _ betrothed- _”

“I am. Not all cages are iron.”

Jon laughs, a bitter sound. “A cage with cushions and slaves and grapes. I would know nothing of it, simple barbarian that I am.”

“You have no idea the things I’ve endured.” Sansa’s voice is cold enough to cut. “No idea what I’ve given to stand here today. What I’ve had to swallow down and smile through. Whose hands I’ve let on me. Do you think you are the only one that has suffered, Jon?”

Jon looks away, bitter and tired; of this girl from another world, this girl from a world that he’d so desperately wanted but could never have, a world that had been ripped from him all the same. “Why are you here?” He asks without looking at her. “What do you want from me, Sansa?”

The same looks as before flickers over Sansa’s eyes, and she takes another step toward the bars. “Jon-”

“Take care, domina,” calls out one of the slavemasters down the line. “That one is wild as a wolf.”

“You should listen to him. We’re wild all of us.” Jon jerks his chin at where the other gladiators who fought in the arena stand shackled like him, each separated from the next the better to let the Romans gawk at them. Most are barbarians like him, prisoners of the tribes beyond the light of Rome: Tormund the massive red bearded bear of a man the others name Giantsbane; Ygritte the spearmaid who the crowd cheer as Kissed by Fire; Val the Woad-Maid with her honey dark hair and arms inked with strange and twisting blue knots; Varamyr who wore a cloak sewn of animal pelts and called himself Six-Skins; tall and cunning Mance the Raider with his hard smile.

“I thought myself a Roman too,” Mance had told Jon when first they met chained in the heaving belly of a slave ship. “Like you I was raised as a ward among them. But even a house dog is still only a dog, fit only for scraps, fit only to slake their bloodthirst. And a mighty thirst these Romans have.”

Jon had not wanted to believe it. All his life he’d lived with the uneasy shame in the pit of his gut of his barbarian birth, all his life been told that Rome was the light of civilization. Apart he’d held himself from the other gladiators at first, but that had been beaten out of him bruise by bruise and lash by stinging lash. “You’re one of us,” Ygritte had laughed one night when they were both deep in their cups after a hard fought day in the arena, cheap wine a sting on the tongue, “don’t ever think you’re not just because you lived among them once, kneeler.”

It was the night they’d first taken to bed. The night that Ygritte had straddled his lap and reached beneath his tunic to stroke him stiff as she kissed him, hard and bruising and tongue tart with wine. The night he’d surged up against her and fisted his fingers in her hair, that red hair from another life, jerked back her head to bare her throat and nip and bruise the lines of it like he truly was the wolf the Romans said he was.

He’d tried to lose himself there. Tried to lose himself in the heat of Ygritte, be more beast than man as he took her, tried to forget himself as she panted and moaned and taunted him to ride her harder, tried to forget all that had been taken from him and all those he’d failed, to forget all he’d ever wanted or hoped for, to forget the haughty blue eyed girl whose hair flashed copper in the sun who Ygritte both looked everything and nothing like.

But with Sansa standing only a foot away, just as achingly lovely as he remembers, Jon understands dully, in some part of himself he’d tried to bury, just how truly pointless that was. He looks away, suddenly weary beyond words, all the days exhaustion settling over his shoulders: the cut across his side, the sting of sweat in his eyes, the dull burn of his limbs.

“You should listen to him.” Jon repeats with a weary jerk of his chin at the slavemaster. “That barbarian boy who warded with your father is long gone. He wasn’t worth a proper Roman death when the Lannista found him, but he died all the same. All that’s left is a wolf.”

Sansa bites her lip. He eyes drift down from Jon’s face to the map of muscles and scars across his chest and shoulders in a way that makes Jon feel naked as she traces the long knitted slash along his ribs from a Thracian sword, the small and ugly pucker above his hip where the barbed tine of a trident had been ripped out, the scarred patches pockmarking his shoulder from where he’d scraped the flesh clean to the bone throwing himself back against the sandstone of an arena wall to avoid the swing of an axe that would’ve taken his head.

“You’re no wolf, Jon.” Sansa’s eyes rise to meet his again, and Jon feels even more naked than he had a moment before. “You never were.”

Jon swallows back the bitter laugh bubbling in his chest, the irony of her- of all people- of _ Sansa_\- he closes his eyes and shakes his head. “What does it matter?” He asks tiredly. “What do you want, Sansa? Why are you here?”

She doesn’t answer at once. Her eyes drift to the other gladiators, then out to the crowd of citizens gawking at them. “You can tell no one who you truly are, Jon. If Joffreus and the other Lannista knew you were still alive they would have you killed at once, favorite of the mob or no.”

“I wasn’t worth killing three years ago, not worth wasting the handful of denari a barbarian could fetch in the arena. Why bother now?”

“Because things are changing and the Lannista are not as favored as they once were. Not by the city, and not by the mob. I’m sorry as children that I- that we never-” Sansa looks away. The breeze plays with the strays of her hair, and she combs them back. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. I know you don’t love me, Jon. That there’s always been little love lost between us. And I’m sorry for that.” The eyes she turns to him are hard. “But what comes next won’t take love.”

_ I know you don’t love me. _ Jon wishes it was true. It would be easier if it was. Easier to turn from this girl who has haunted his dreams through years of blood and sand and woe. To become the wolf the Romans say he is, to bury that boy from another life, to be nothing but the ring of a blade and spray of blood and roar of a crowd. It would be easier. But has never been able to turn from her, not when they were children and she would laugh and toss her copper hair and his eyes would follow her despite how they shouldn’t, and not now a woman grown tall and slim and beautiful and cold, and so what he finds himself asking is, “and what comes next?”

“Blood.” The eyes Sansa meets Jon’s with are distant and cold as some windswept peak, voice sharp as the cut of ice. “I’m going to make the Lannista pay, Jon. For what they’ve done. For betraying my family. I’m going to take everything from them they hold dear.” Sansa’s fingers whispers against the iron bars as she steps forward, eyes tilting to meet Jon’s as though there were no bars between them at all. “And when that’s done, when their joy has turned to ash and they see all they love reduced to rubble, then and only then I’ll put a sword in your hand, Jon, and you'll finish our vengeance.”

**Author's Note:**

> This idea originally came to me as an epic multi-chapter fic where the Starks are betrayed by the Lannisters and split up like in canon: Jon taken as a gladiator, Sansa held hostage by the Lannisters, and Arya run away to the barbarian tribes beyond Rome. Together the three would have to work together to wreak vengeance on the Lannisters: Jon win over the mob, Sansa the Roman senate, and Arya the barbarian tribes.
> 
> But, uh, that’s a lot of writing and I already have too many wips, so I decided to just skip to the good part. I may write another chapter or two of this, but if so it’ll just be skipping to the shippy parts, so adjust expectations accordingly.
> 
> Also, I know this is not even vaguely close to how to properly latinize names, but I find doing it this way endlessly hilarious, so don’t at me.


End file.
